The Sunday Hangman

6

There are dreams that can affect the whole of a man’s working day. In the case of a very sweet dream, or of a positively terrible one, its influence can extend over a period far greater than that. Such a dream is, generally speaking, best not dreamed at all.

This had always been Kramer’s belief, and it was why he was trying to get back to sleep again, the sooner to expunge all traces of the girl with long legs. Then again, to dream of one female, and to wake up in the bed of another, could leave a bloke feeling guilty for no good reason at all. But he remained dozing, remembering her now only in patches of sharp, scented detail: the neat knob of a wristbone, sweat pearled in the cup above her breastbone, the muss of honey wisps, a nipple swelling from pink raisin to grape, and the pinch of those long legs, straddling him, turning him over and over, and her laughter. So simple, so uncomplicated, so greedy it shocked him, made him greedy as well. Her crazy joy in him.

“Hey,” said the Widow Fourie, whose warm back smoothed his belly, “what’s the point, when Joanna will be in with the tea soon?”

He rolled away and looked down at the polished floorboards, noticing where the original owner’s great stinkwood bed had left the impression of a caster; what a hell of a nightly battering it must have withstood to do that. Then this gratuitous lewdness disgusted him, and he went to take a bath.

The Widow Fourie wandered in a few minutes later, carrying the tea tray, and bringing her cigarettes with her. Like Strydom, she often complained about getting in five minutes of proper conversation, and this had long been her little trick. She knew, of course, that the door would never be bolted.

“How are you this morning?” she asked, settling on the lavatory lid, which she’d prettified with blue lace. “You may not know this, but you were in a hell of a state all night. Worse than when the girls both had flu and I had them in with me.”

Kramer, who liked to soak with only his nose, and as little else as possible, above water, shrugged a ripple down the bath.

“I’ve also been thinking about this hangman, though,” she continued, clattering the cups, “and this I do know: he must be connected in some way with the prisons department. It’s the only way of gaining the required knowledge-you can’t tell me that the convicts really pick up anything but rumors. I remember reading once that a senior lecturer in criminology at the University of S.A. had to pretend he was a barber-actually his dad had been one-just to hear the inside story of Pretoria Central. You know how fussy they are about strangers in the jails? This prof or whatever used to cut the warders’ hair across the road and ask them questions, just casually sort of. Are you taking this in?”

He raised his chin to say: “Fine, you’ve narrowed it down to an insider-but how many warders do you think there are in this country? We’ve over two hundred and fifty jails, a hundred thousand locked up in them-”

“Ach, you know perfectly well what I mean! The expert knowledge has to come from somewhere, and at least we know roughly where that is. Your tea’s poured.”

Although voices carried well, he needed cues like this, especially when a tap was running.

“Ta, my girl. I can see the Doc’s nonsense has really caught your imagination.”

“Don’t try to bluff me you aren’t wondering a bit!”

“To tell you the truth,” said Kramer, taking his cup. “I’m putting the who and why of this right out of my mind until we get a lead on Erasmus’s last whereabouts. Switch that off, please.”

She obliged, frowning slightly as if dissatisfied with his reply, but not actually querying it.

“Then you’ve got something else on your mind, Trompie, or you’d have tried out the new frigate Janie’s made. He says it’s to shoot General Amin with, for what he does to people, but I told him Uganda hasn’t got any sea and besides-”

Kramer had submerged briefly, making quite a splash. He stepped out and took up his towel.

“Ja, ja, so maybe I have.”

“Oh, that!” The Widow laughed, putting down her teacup. “That’s the whole trouble with having servants.”

“No, I-”

“Come on, why don’t we, though?” she said with sudden mischief. “Jo’s back in the kitchen and the kids aren’t up.”

She rose and slipped home the bolt slowly and suggestively, making a funny, erotic thing of it, watching his eyes. Then she began loosening the gown which covered her voluptuous maturity, her wealth of warmth and tenderness so enveloping. How detached the girl had been, how detached, he remembered; how free she had left him.

The Widow Fourie let go of the bow she had been undoing in her belt. “Is it Zondi again?” she asked solemnly. “There is definitely something; I can sense it.”

Kramer began drying his hair.

“Now listen to me, Trompie. I’ve had an idea recently. If the worst comes to the worst, and his leg doesn’t get any better, then why not start using some of the land round the back?

Mickey could find-well-things to plant in it for us, turn it into a market garden. I know he grew up on a farm, so he’s bound to be able to-you know.”

“All he knows of farming is what it did to his dad.”

“He could learn, though. You’re the one who’s always said how intelligent he is.”

“Mickey’s leg is mending nicely; you’ll see.”

“He should have gone on giving it rest after-”

“For him to decide.”

“Oh, no,” said the Widow Fourie, very firmly. “Chris Strydom says that you’re the one who lets his hopes rise. Without you, he’d be treated like any other boy in the same situation, and it isn’t right-”

“Behind my back, hey?”

“I just happened to see Chris in the street.”

“Uh huh.”

“Tromp, you’ve got to realize this is for your sake as well! I wouldn’t, normally. You know how I-”

“Then look at my back,” he said, stalking out, “and try to remember it.”

That made a lousy start to the morning. Admittedly, there was nothing rational in the tacit agreement over the leg, but Kramer knew where it mattered most to him-in his gut-that Zondi needed his backing all the way, whatever purpose he chose to put it to. And while the work still got done, sod them and their red tape; he just didn’t want to know.

His punch knocked wide the door to Fingerprints, and he followed it through with a cheerful greeting.

“You can go out and start again,” Lieutenant Dirk Gardiner advised him, rising stockily in his blue safari suit. “This isn’t the place for what you’re hoping.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing,” affirmed Gardiner, handing over the Bible.

“You put the rays on it?”

“The lot. It’s full of miracles, but none of them worked for you, my friend.”

Gardiner was one of the few people Kramer knew who could crack jokes while their breath still smelted of breakfast. For once, however, this did nothing for him, and he had to force an appreciative groan before leaving.

So much for Fingerprints.

Ballistics didn’t even try to soften the blow, but dispassionately delivered both barrels. The Colt.38 was not the same gun that had been used during the raid at Peacevale, nor was either of the recovered weapons described on the list of reported thefts. Kramer asked for more work to be done on the metal where the numbers had been filed off.

“It won’t necessarily get us anywhere,” murmured the ballistics man. “And we’ve got a lot on.”

“Try it. Could be the owners were too scared to tell you their firearms had been taken, or maybe they don’t even know yet.”

“Hmmm.”

“We’d have two addresses. I know it’s a faint chance, but Erasmus could have stolen them himself.”

The ballistics man made a sound like a silencer and went back into his lab.

So much for bloody science.

With the Bible in his right hand, and swearing quietly under his breath, Kramer took himself out onto the pavement. As chance would have it, an Anglican minister walked by on his way to the cathedral, pretending he didn’t hear the row coming from Security on the first floor.

“Excuse me, Reverend,” Kramer said on impulse, blocking his path, “but if you wanted to know about Bibles, where would you go?”

The minister responded warily, easing the dog collar around his plump throat, and clearing some phlegm there.

“Is this to do with television?” he asked, glancing about.

“No, sir; I’m from CID here, working on an investigation. This is the Bible we’ve got an interest in, you see, and we were hoping it’d give us a lead.”

“Ah. Has it a bookshop label in it?”

“Been removed.”

“Mmmm. Then one wouldn’t really know where one should start. Not an authority on them myself, of course. Tell you what, though, there’s always the Christian bookshop up the road a bit. You must know it?”

Having received his directions, Kramer set off at a brisk pace that gradually slowed down, adapting itself to a more sensible approach to a venture that held little promise. Quite soon he was half enjoying his walk, and the minor distractions it afforded him. The morning was muggy and warm, and the sky still the misty white of a bathroom mirror, which had brought out the housewives in their brightest of frocks. They darted from car to store like tropical fish-some were just as ugly-and flicked away from the gray-skinned beggar crabbing his legless way down the gray paving stones. If you did catch their eye, they never blinked. More interesting were the gawpers, blacks for the most part, whose fixed stares made them blink a good deal, as they stood outside shopwindows watching the miracle of the SATV test card. Every other bloody shop seemed to be selling sets, Kramer noted, and this included a hairdressing salon and, so far, two respectable jewelers’. The gawpers were interesting because you had to work out which were honest idiots, and which were pickpockets and bag-snatchers responding intelligently to the advent of television. Then came Toll Street and the dividing line between bustling commercialism and the sort of shop assistants who kept a good book under the till. He crossed over against the lights, to hold himself in trim, and started along a wide sidewalk that had little eddies of confetti in its gutter. Just about every denomination known to Trekkersburg had its main church between that set of traffic lights and the next: Baptist, Dutch Reformed, Presbyterian, Methodist, Congregationalist, Mormon-and, at the far end, Lutheran, playing David and Goliath with the Bleeding Heart towering above it across the way. There was a funeral on there, and the undertakers were out having a smoke; Kramer gave old George Henry Abbot a wave, called out that he’d drop by soon, and took the next turning.

He immediately recognized the long, low facade of the yellow-brick bookshop, but excused himself his oversight on the grounds that, with its total lack of people appeal in the sign-writing of Larkin and Sons, Ltd., and its air of complacent prosperity, he had always thought the place sold veterinary supplies to stock breeders. That just showed how much you could miss from a car.

You could also miss quite a lot from the pavement. When Kramer went up the steps and into the showroom, he was astonished by what he saw there. Hell, never mind being Christian; Larkin’s looked the biggest bloody bookshop in town. There were thousands of glossy volumes on the wall shelves and on the display units that covered the vast, carpeted floor, together with an unimaginable number of knickknacks-like the molded relief map of the Holy Land, or the Sunday school blackboard-and some pretty weird stuff near the cash desk. He browsed through this while the salesman wrapped up something in brown paper for a nun.

For twenty cents, you could buy a patch, presumably to sew on your jeans, that said Jesus Never Lets Me Down. At thirty cents, there was an American comic book called God’s Smuggler, which told the true story of a young Dutchman who said things such as: “One Bible could buy a cow now in Russia!” and was rewarded by having a sexy wife with massive bosoms. But Kramer’s chief delight was an American magazine entitled the Moody Monthly-in honor of some famous preacher, it seemed-which he very nearly bought for the Colonel’s secretary.

Then the salesman, an old gentleman in rimless glasses tinted slightly blue, asked what he could do to be of service, and examined the Bible most meticulously.

“Jiminy,” he said. “I’m afraid you couldn’t have picked on a commoner sort. I might have sold it, I might not. This is also the line carried by the ordinary trade, and so there’s no end of places it could have come from. I am sorry.”

“Are you sure, sir?” Kramer persisted.

“In 1975, South Africa became the largest distributor of complete Bibles in the world,” the salesman disclosed proudly. “I have in my office a United Bible Societies report. Would it help you in any way for your superiors to see it? Then I’m sure they’ll understand that you’ve done for them all you can.”

Kramer thanked him for his thoughtfulness, spurned the offer, and left, crumpling the free tract he’d been given. Bibles, next! — when the English-language press had already claimed that the Republic was a world leader in gun-owning, divorces, murders, assaults, road deaths, suicides, persons shot by the police, and of course, after all that, executions. The weight of statistics against his chances of success, even in the long term, was beginning to bear down intolerably, while luck, his only hope of relief, had clearly reneged on him. Like one other bitch he could mention.

Zondi had felt the younger children leave the bed they shared with him soon after their mother had done. When the smell of maize porridge began to drift in from the other room, he had heard the twins stir beneath the window, squabble in whispers over whose turn it was to stow away their mattress, and then go creeping out. For a long while following that, he’d heard and felt nothing, but had slept deep, where a man’s spirit was restored.

Now he was awake and watching Miriam through the doorway, touching his wife’s fine, straight-backed body with his eyes, and admiring the grace she brought to the humdrum tasks of the home. Once, however, she would have been humming softly-too softly to disturb him-and it was noticeable how silent she was. These were difficult times.

He yawned loudly, patting the sound as it came out, for a comical effect, and sat up.

Miriam smiled round at him. “I suppose you will be hungry now,” she said. “There is mealie meal on the stove, and hot water, too.”

“Hau! And I see my suit is neatly pressed. Is there a dress you have seen in some window?”

That made her laugh; it always did. Miriam had never thought to buy a new dress in her life, but she’d worked for a white family, where this catchphrase had originated. Her amusement was gone the next instant, when, unable to stop himself, Zondi flinched as he moved his leg and the rat woke up, too.

“Come, there is hot water,” Miriam repeated brusquely. “I will also put on the kettle and my big pot.”

He shuffled through to the other room, and found her zinc washing tub already positioned on some newspaper to protect the rammed-earth floor. With that grace he’d been watching, Miriam hefted an old paraffin tin off the stove and tipped four gallons of near-boiling water into the tub without spilling more than a drop. Then she carefully added a little cold from another tin, and nodded for him to get in. By wriggling about a bit, and by sticking his feet out straight, and leaning far back, Zondi found the right position again. He lapped the water over his thigh with his hand.

“It’s good,” he said.

Miriam went out to fill the kettle and pot at their tap next to the privy. While she was gone, Zondi gave his leg a ringing slap, to see what that might do, and thought it had worked for a moment. Then Mr. Rat recovered from his surprise and bit back.

“There is sweat on your lip,” murmured Miriam, pumping the Primus for the kettle.

“A hot day, woman-don’t you feel it?”

“Do you work this hot day?”

“Later.”

He knew she’d sigh.

“But the boss Erasmus is dead. Can you not now-”

“No,” said Zondi, who would debate this matter with no one-not even himself, come to think of it.

“You are always cross with the children,” she went on. “You don’t listen to why they think their education is not so good.”

“You have heard what happened in Soweto? I am the one who knows how to work with authority! With children it is always the same; they are too impatient. And they must tell me if they hear of agitators, because those men are very foolish.”

“Hau! You would talk of foolish men, is that so?”

The water was fast losing its warmth. Zondi soaped both his legs and cunningly massaged the right one. Then he sniffed, noted a strange aroma, and looked up to see what his wife was mixing in a cup.

“Yes, my husband,” she said, “I have been to the street of the witch doctors, and there I have paid good money for what you told my mother was rubbish for old savages. Now drink!”

Zondi drank. He was, very secretly, desperate. And besides, his gentle wife had the kettle poised over his genitals.

The unbelievable breakthrough came at almost exactly the same hour that the new man from Fingerprints had walked up to Kramer the previous day. It owed nothing to luck, and had very little to do with statistics, but had been preordained by the system.

Kramer was slumped alone in his office, with his feet on the window sill and his brain on a shelf, when fatherly Warrant Officer Henk Wessels, from Records, looked in.

“I’ve just been talking to the station sergeant at Witklip,” he said, taking Zondi’s stool from behind its deal table. “Maybe you know him-Frikkie Jonkers?”

For a moment there, Kramer wasn’t even sure that he knew where Witklip was, then he recalled a tiny dorp way up, practically in Zululand. On the other score he had to admit ignorance.

“Ach, Frikkie’s all right,” Wessels observed carelessly. “Got a chip on his shoulder, and isn’t what you’d call a mass of intelligence, but I think the pace of Witklip just suits him. Three stock thefts, a beer party, and that’s his week gone. Anyway, as I was saying, he gave me a tinkle.”

“Uh huh?”

“Just on the off chance, Frikkie said. You know, he’s got this big chum of his who runs a hotel there? Hotel? Christ, that’s a bloody joke! The bastard cheats townies into booking it for their holidays by advertising horseback riding and all sorts. You’ve got to break the bloody horses in first! Him.”

“You’ve been there?” asked Kramer, glad of the diversion, and already tasting the stolen vodka in this.

“My eldest did; nearly broke his heart, poor kiddie. On his honeymoon, too, it was. I wanted to sue. Anyway, seems they’ve had this bloke Tommy McKenzie staying there for quite some time, and then suddenly he vanishes. Two nights ago. So they look in his room and find his suitcase-a cheap job-and a few clothes-stuff nobody would worry about leaving behind. Not a large amount involved, Frikkie tells me, on the hotel bill, that is. And maybe he’ll be coming back tonight, but to be on the safe side, he wanted a check. The name wasn’t on our hotel-bilkers list, so I asked for a full description. Here, Lieutenant, old son-you take a look.”

Kramer scanned the particulars and noted that they matched, in most respects, the particulars he had himself used to describe Tollie Erasmus. But what clinched the matter, on paper at any rate, was the green Ford with TJ number plates.

Then he shook his head. “Tollie? In Witklip? You talk about a townie, man! Hell, the idea of going to a place like this would never enter his head.”